ABSTRACT
Species were simply human constructs that divided an evolutionary continuum into convenient packages. Transformational theories of evolution are concerned with how taxonomic characters change and view species as emergent phenomena of the process. New Guinea is the centre of birds-of-paradise diversity where some forty species can be found; a further three species are found in Australia and three species – the Halmahera Paradise Crow, the Obi Paradise Crow and Wallace’s Standardwing – in Halmahera and Obi, Indonesia. The Paradise Crow is the oldest surviving member of the Paradisaeidae and is related to species that are otherwise restricted to cratonic areas of the lowlands and lower montane forests of New Guinea. A working hypothesis is that Wallace’s Standardwing arrived in Halmahera following the collision of the East Halmahera Arc with the continental margin of New Guinea during the Oligocene as evinced by the Australian continental rocks found on Obi.
